#scale tree

The current image of the Academy is a complicated one, as it relies heavily on who you are asking. Obviously, ask any member of the Church and they will label them cruel dissectors and blasphemers that mock any faith and cast aside morals in rabid pursuit of knowledge. Those who are not tied to the golden faith, though, still have their fair share of complaints. That isn't to say the Academy is widely reviled, as it holds a good amount of territory won over by folks who have joined their side. Their inventions and medicines certainly encourage supporters, and they are not as judgemental as the Church when its comes backgrounds and beliefs. The issue is that the Academy has had the Church tainting its public image from practically day one, on top of the fact that the Academy has absolutely botched it from time to time. Every large institute has its share of fumbles, but the Academy doesn't get the luxury of faith and influence that the Church uses to soften the blows. And there have certainly been instances when there is no saving face, and the creation of Rogue is one of those instances.

Antiquary Wawel had sought to create an artificial organa that could produce Eitr and wished to power a colossal dracomaton with it. His efforts made something that worked a bit too well, resulting in a Primal Flame meltdown as the organa failed to shut off. The birth of the raging construct dubbed "Rogue" was a massive Eitr-fueled explosion that claimed Wawel, his entire facility and chunks of the surrounding forest. The heat was so intense that it even melted Rogue's verdigris plating, and it turned the lab into a ruin of slag. The ensuing rampage of the construct gained most of the attention of this incredible mistake, and its continued existence remains a thorn in the Academy's side and a stain upon their public image. What gets focused upon less is the ground zero where it all happened. The Academy lab was decimated and much of the forest burned, and most folk think purely on this destruction. However, it is what lingered after the fires died down that makes this site more than just a monument of failure.

After the fires went out and the ashes cooled, the Academy sent a team into the blast zone to scope out the ruins. There was damage to assess for sure, but they went in to retrieve anything that survived the detonation and look for any clues on how to turn off Rogue. Not much was recovered from the melted lab, and their search for answers resulted in even less. The brief expedition would wind up becoming an interesting failure when the team would return with incredible sickness. Burns would develop on the skin, respiratory problems would emerge and they would be seized by a terrible fever. Study on the team would show poisoning similar to Eitr exposure, yet there had not been any such fluid seen at the site. The Academy would try to save as many as they could, but over half of the team would perish to this toxicity. This, of course, spurred another group to go out to the ruins, but these ones were better prepared.

Rather than diving into the scorched land to get to the ruins, they sat upon the border of the zone. With protective gear and breathing equipment, they ran tests upon the very air and soil of the blast site. What they got back answered their questions in the worse way. The massive meltdown of Primal Flame had scoured this area, but it had not truly vanished once the flames died down. Their measurements showed that Eitr energeiai still lingered in the zone, practically saturating the air and ground. To even walk into this place would be to get a heavy dose of Eitr that would only get worse the longer you lingered. The very toxicity and heat of this Godly Fluid overwhelmed this site, making it incredibly dangerous for man to enter. Only those with proper protective gear and a clean air source could go in without worry. But even then, there was fear that the caustic nature of this toxic air could eat through seals and clearvein, eventually rendering gear useless. The danger was obvious, thus the Academy would quarantine the entire zone, setting up fences and warning signs. But amongst all these things meant to keep people out, a little lab was built as well. Such an anomaly was not one the Academy was just going to seal away and forget.

Most early work on the area dubbed "Wawel Ruins" would focus on the air and soil, trying to get a read on this corrupted energeiai and how to cleanse it. Some wondered if purifying these samples could lead to medicinal breakthroughs, or perhaps this lingering Eitr could be a potential power source. Those stationed in this lab would barely enter the zone, just enough to gather samples, setup equipment and test new gear. Months would go by without much to report, until the day came for an aerial survey. The researchers would utilize some Janggan and hot air balloons to get measurements from above, trying to see how high the poison reached. But as they ran their tests, they spotted something bizarre deep in Wawel Ruins. Reports of some kind of growth, which didn't make sense for an area bathed in toxic energeiai. The initial air test was practically abandoned on the spot, as the researchers geared up to enter the Wawel Ruins. The excursion would be a brief one, as they didn't want to risk being exposed for too long, but they had to see this for themselves. They hurried into the depths of the scorched land, and were stunned to find it far less barren than it once had been.

For the longest time, they had simply stared at a forest of burnt tree trunks from their lab, but deep in the heart of this zone was something extraordinary. Plants had returned to this wasteland, the forest was rebuilding itself, yet there was something wrong. Trees grew distorted, their bark gnarled and blackened. Simple foliage was mutated into bizarre shapes and useless designs, yet they still grew. It seemed that the Eitr energeiai had a negative effect upon them, yet their mere presence showed a hidden blessing. The trees had grown far faster than they should have, their size requiring years, not months, to reach. No doubt the Godly Fluid was fueling them, at a cost. But that wasn't the strangest, as when they reached the ruins themselves, they found new growth that defied explanation.

From drawings of what they found, Antiquaries would confirm that these plants resembled ones that grew back in the Age of Eitr. The fossils they dug up looked quite similar, which would suggest that this Eitr explosion had sparked new plant life from nowhere. But it was even stranger, because the researchers aren't really sure that they are plants. They had the shape of plants, with trunks, branches and roots, yet the flesh and build was all wrong. The trees were covered in scales, but ones more fitting for a dragon. Cutting for samples would cause a highly corrosive sap to bleed out, and its look was more Eitr than Amber. Leaves shaped like wings, blossoms of fangs and tongues. It was a garden born of dragon flesh, an echo of past plant life that was molded from animal parts. It was a fusion of flora and fauna, Amber and Eitr mixed into one. And it was still growing....

Hello! I've decided to draw three pieces that could potentially be made into real accessories in the future. I themed them after what else, PALEONTOLOGY!!! Here are some details about the pieces I made.

Henodus Fascinator Headband

Henodus was a large, herbivorous, brackish water, marine reptile from the late Triassic. Despite looking a lot like a turtle, it is not closely related to modern turtles and tortoises. I thought it looked like some ostentatious headwear, so I tried to design it as such.

Sinosauropteryx Suitcase!

Did you know that paleontologists actually figured out the coloration of Sinosauropteryx? It had similar coloration to a red panda. I thought a faux fur handle and striped sides would really add to the look

Carboniferous Heeled Loafers

If I had a time machine, the first place I would visit would be the Carboniferous. Spanning from 358.9 to 298.9 million years ago, this was a strange time in Earth’s history. The continents were jumbled together into two great landmasses - Laurasia to the north and Gondwana to the south and the equatorial regions were dominated by humid, tropical swamps. To explore these swamps would be to explore one of the most alien landscapes this world has ever known.

The Carboniferous was the heyday for early land plants. Giant lycopods, ferns, and horsetails formed the backbone of terrestrial ecosystems. By far the most abundant plants during these times were a group of giant, tree-like lycopsids known as the scale trees. Scale trees collectively make up the extinct genus Lepidodendron and despite constantly being compared to modern day club mosses (Lycopodiopsida), experts believe they were more closely related to the quillworts (Isoetopsida).

It is hard to say for sure just how many species of scale tree there were. Early on, each fragmentary fossil was given its own unique taxonomic classification; a branch was considered to be one species while a root fragment was considered to be another and juvenile tree fossils were classified differently than adults. As more complete specimens were unearthed, a better picture of scale tree diversity started to emerge. Today I can find references to anywhere between 4 and 13 named species of scale tree and surely more await discovery. What we can say for sure is that scale tree biology was bizarre.

The name “scale tree” stems from the fossilized remains of their bark, which resembles reptile skin more than it does anything botanical. Fossilized trunk and stem casts are adorned with diamond shaped impressions arranged in rows of ascending spirals. These are not scales, of course, but rather they are leaf scars. In life, scale trees were adorned with long, needle-like leaves, each with a single vein for plumbing. Before the started branching, young trees would have resembled a bushy, green bottle brush.

As scale trees grew, it is likely that they shed their lower leaves, which left behind the characteristic diamond patterns that make their fossils so recognizable. How these plants achieved growth is rather fascinating. Scale tree cambium was unifacial, meaning it only produced cells towards its interior, not in both directions as we see in modern trees. As such, only secondary xylem was produced. Overall, scale trees would not have been very woody plants. Most of the interior of the trunk and stems was comprised of a spongy cortical meristem. Because of this, the structural integrity of the plant relied on the thick outer “bark.” Many paleobotanists believe that this anatomical quirk made scale trees vulnerable to high winds.

Scale trees were anchored into their peaty substrate by rather peculiar roots. Originally described as a separate species, the roots of these trees still retain their species name. Paleobotanists refer to them as “stigmaria” and they were unlike most roots we encounter today. Stigmaria were large, limb-like structures that branched dichotomously in the soil. Each main branch was covered in tiny spots that were also arranged in rows of ascending spirals. At each spot, a rootlet would have grown outward, likely partnering with mycorrhizal fungi in search of water and nutrients.

Eventually scale trees would reach a height in which branching began. Their tree-like canopy was also the result of dichotomous branching of each new stem. Amazingly, the scale tree canopy reached staggering heights. Some specimens have been found that were an estimated 100 ft (30 m) tall! It was once thought that scale trees reached these lofty heights in as little as 10 to 15 years, which is absolutely bonkers to think about. However, more recent estimates have cast doubt on these numbers. The authors of one paper suggest that there is no biological mechanism available that could explain such rapid growth rates, concluding that the life span of a typical scale tree was more likely measured in centuries rather than years.

Regardless of how long it took them to reach such heights, they nonetheless would have been impressive sites. Remarkably, enough of these trees have been preserved in situ that we can actually get a sense for how these swampy habitats would have been structured. Whenever preserved stumps have been found, paleobotanists remark on the density of their stems. Scale trees did not seem to suffer much from overcrowding.

The fact that they spent most of their life as a single, unbranched stem may have allowed for more success in such dense situations. In fact, those that have been lucky enough to explore these fossilized forests often comment on how similar their structure seems compared to modern day cypress swamps. It appears that warm, water-logged conditions present similar selection pressures today as they did 350+ million years ago.

Like all living things, scale trees eventually had to reproduce. From the tips of their dichotomosly branching stems emerged spore-bearing cones. The fact that they emerge from the growing tips of the branches suggests that each scale tree only got one shot at reproduction. Again, analyses of some fossilized scale tree forests suggests that these plants were monocarpic, meaning each plant died after a single reproductive event. In fact, fossilized remains of a scale tree forest in Illinois suggests that mass reproductive events may have been the standard for at least some species. Scale trees would all have established at around the same time, grown up together, and then reproduced and died en masse. Their death would have cleared the way for their developing offspring. What an experience that must have been for any insect flying around these ancient swamps.

Compared to modern day angiosperms, the habits of the various scale trees may seem a bit inefficient. Nonetheless, this was an extremely successful lineage of plants. Scale trees were the dominant players of the warm, humid, equatorial swamps. However, their dominance on the landscape may have actually been their downfall. In fact, scale trees may have helped bring about an ice age that marked the end of the Carboniferous.

You see, while plants were busy experimenting with building ever taller, more complex anatomies using compounds such as cellulose and lignin, the fungal communities of that time had not yet figured out how to digest them. As these trees grew into 100 ft monsters and died, more and more carbon was being tied up in plant tissues that simply weren’t decomposing. This lack of decomposition is why we humans have had so much Carboniferous coal available to us. It also meant that tons of CO2, a potent greenhouse gas, were being pulled out of the atmosphere millennia after millennia.

As atmospheric CO2 levels plummeted and continents continued to shift, the climate was growing more and more seasonal. This was bad news for the scale trees. All evidence suggests that they were not capable of keeping up with the changes that they themselves had a big part in bringing about. By the end of the Carboniferous, Earth had dipped into an ice age. Earth’s new climate regime appeared to be too much for the scale trees to handle and they were driven to extinction. The world they left behind was primed and ready for new players. The Permian would see a whole new set of plants take over the land and would set the stage for even more terrestrial life to explode onto the scene.

It is amazing to think that we owe much of our industrialized society to scale trees whose leaves captured CO2 and turned it into usable carbon so many millions of years ago. It seems oddly fitting that, thanks to us, scale trees are once again changing Earth’s climate. As we continue to pump Carboniferous CO2 into our atmosphere, one must stop to ask themselves which dominant organisms are most at risk from all of this recent climate change?

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